Search This Blog

Loading...

Sunday, December 6, 2015

Adele: 25

ADELE: 25 (2015)

1) Hello; 2) Send My Love (To
Your New Lover); 3) I Miss You; 4) When We Were Young; 5) Remedy; 6) Water
Under The Bridge; 7) River Lea; 8) Love In The Dark; 9) Million Years Ago; 10)
All I Ask; 11) Sweetest Devotion.

"Hello. It's me. I was wondering if after
all these years you'd like to meet, to go over everything". Kind of a
humble start for a mega-star whose millions of fans have been dying for years to see just where
Adele's journey of spiritual growth would take her next. And if press release
stuff and Wikipedia rumors have anything to them, this journey was actually in
danger of coming to a premature end — she had expressed a desire for early
retirement, either due to pressures of family life or because she had an
inclination that, perhaps, 21 had
her at the top of her game and that it would have been so much cooler to go out
on top.

And yes, it would. Most good stories in the 21st
century tend to have crappy sequels, and with 25, our little fairy tale, too, seems to have exhausted the limits
of good taste and creativity and turn into its own crooked mirror image.
Honestly, I was not expecting that any follow-up to 21 could match the cohesive greatness of that record — but neither
was I expecting such a direct, express jet trip to Crapsville. And what makes
matters so much worse is that 21,
like it or not, had a great educational
value: through those songs, millions of people had access to solid melodies,
real soul, and genuine instrumentation, not to mention a chance to get
interested in Time Out Of Mind and Disintegration. For a brief moment out
there, it seemed like here was a really strong-willed, independent woman artist
that could lead the masses — or even, with a stroke of luck, dictate her own
terms to the corporate music industry.

But no dice. Enter 25, a thoroughly disappointing, bland, formulaic record of big «adult contem­porary» ballads, produced by no
less than eleven different producers,
co-written by Adele with no less than the same number of different songwriters,
and featuring no real spiritual
growth what­soever. The only new emotional strand is that of nostalgia and
forgiveness — the Adele of 21 seemed
preoccupied with her current troubles, the Adele of 25 seems to be looking for artistic in­spiration largely in past
troubles ("they say that time's supposed to heal you, but I ain't done
much healing"); no wonder, since it does not look like she'd had a lot of
troubles for the previous four years. A happy marriage, a son, a well-secured
financial present and future, plenty of charity work — no wonder that now, in
order to keep up the broken-hearted image, she has to turn her mind back on the
past.

And it does not work. We could, of course, put
most of the blame on the producers, who did their best to dress all of these
melodies in the most generic rhythms and sonic textures; but I believe that no
one is more to blame than Adele herself, who just so clearly did not need to
put out this album — it is so utterly unnatural, so strenuously pushed into
unnecessary existence, that the only frickin' question is: WHY? Goddammit, if you are so obviously content with your life, why do you consider yourself obligated
to put out a collection of dark, morose, monotonous ballads with conventional
frameworks and clichéd hooks (or «non-hooks»)? Just because you are «Adele, the
Queen of the Dark Heart-Tug?» and people would not buy your records if you
preferred to cover ʽBanana Boat Songʼ instead?

The opening piano chords of ʽHelloʼ may aspire
to genius simplicity, but I wonder just how many by-the-book balladeers have
already made my ears insensitive to their effect — and the «depth» that opens
up when the powerhouse chorus hits you is phoney, a well-rehearsed production
trick more than a genuine reflection of one's state of mind. By the time the
song kicks into full gear, electronic hums and drum machines and cavernous
echoes dominating the waves, you don't seem to remember the difference between
Adele and Celine Dion any more. Is this
it, then? That «maturity» by the age of 25 means completing your transformation
into a generic «Diva»?

It does not get much better when the songs get
upbeat, though. ʽSend My Loveʼ starts out with a quiet, but well-audible
"just the guitar!" instruction, which turns out to be a ruse — fairly
soon, we get a trip-hop backing track of the teenybopper variety, aerobic
backing vocals à la Beyonce, and an annoying synthetic chorus — "we gotta
let go of all of our ghosts, we both know we ain't kids no more", on a
track that has the most kiddyish arrangement of 'em all. No wonder, that, since
it was co-written with Max «I Fucked 'Em All, Figuratively Speaking» Martin,
the man to whom you turn when Mephistopheles is unable to hold up his end of
the bargain.

There is only one song on the entire album, as
far as I'm concerned, that strives to break out of the plastic carcass — the
gospel-influenced ʽRiver Leaʼ, produced by and co-written with Danger Mouse;
although the arrangement is still spoiled by a robotic rhythm section, the
organ adds a nice touch, the chorus is catchy, and the main hook is wond'rously
found, with Adele hitting a compassionate note on the "blame it on the
River Lea, the River Lea..." passage. Which makes me wonder if, at this
point, she couldn't have made a fine 21st century Mahalia Jackson — at least
singing about going back to the river seems to bring out the human in her far
more effective­ly than trying to rile herself over some forgotten past lovers.

Alas, one such bit of success does nothing to
alleviate the «dull aching pain» from listening to one forgettable ballad after
another — sometimes exacerbated when the song in question is ʽMillion Years
Agoʼ, a truly awful acoustic «tear-jerker» that sounds as if it's been pulled
directly from one of those whip-out-yer-hanky Euro musicals like Notre Dame De Paris: listening to Adele
crooning "I miss the air, I miss my friends, I miss my mother, I miss it
when life was a party to be thrown..." just makes me cringe in its
absolutely cheap corniness.

How the heck did this happen? How and when and
why did the master songwriter and performer of 21 turn into this replaceable Kelly Clarkson-meets-Vanessa Carlton
type plastic doll? Sure, we still have «The Voice», but it's obviously not just
the voice that made 21 such an
outstanding achievement. My natural guess is simply that the artist... has
nothing more to say. That's just it. She said what she had to say — she made a
wise decision that she would not be saying any more — she was forced to come back because she has no
other profession, because the fans and the record executives cry for more, she
placed herself in the hands of studio pros, she wrote those songs without
properly feeling them, she delivered them because that was what she was
expected to do. Oh, and she even got plenty of rave reviews — «style instead of
substance» is all the rage nowadays, and when you're a big star with a properly
run publicity campaign, naturally there'll be plenty of people falling over
your lyrical clichés and thrice rehashed Serious Chords. But hey, you can
always rely on good old Only Solitaire to cut the crap.

In other words, here is one more case of an
artist metamorphosing into a pseudo-artistic machine. If your reaction is,
"well, she was never all that good anyway", I respectfully disagree: 19 was nice and human, warts and all,
and 21 was as close to a genuine,
sincere masterpiece as commer­cially-oriented «serious pop music» ever gets.
But this — this is as good a pretext as any to change that old adage of «never
trust anybody over thirty» to «never trust anybody over twenty five», as more
and more artists these days flash by like the one-album wonders (two-album won­ders
at best) they are. Oh sure, there's always some fickle hope that the next album
(31, if that particular arithmetic progression
continues to be respected?) will make things right, but who wants to spend the
next six years in fickle hopes? Thumbs down, case closed.

14 comments:

I was in the car 2 days ago with my girlfriend hearing Hello for the first time on the radio (yes, I live under a rock), and I mentioned that it sounded so bland and lifeless compared to Rolling In The Deep or the other singles off 21. She told me it was a sad song and not comparable. I immediately reacted that by the time the music actually started it sounded like a Celine Dion tear jerker playing off nostalgia for the Adelye of albums past. Nice to see I wasn't the only one who thought that. -Jon

One thing that bugs me... if she goes on to make albums into her 60s or 70s, while she end up naming her albums as such, or will she do like every one else with a specific system in naming their albums and ditch said system. After all, only Chicago stuck to their naming system (although a number of albums only have Chicago + number as a subtitle)

"For a brief moment out there, it seemed like here was a really strong-willed, independent woman artist that could lead the masses — or even, with a stroke of luck, dictate her own terms to the corporate music industry."

All right then... wrong phrasing. She was mainstream from the scratch. So, uninteresting and unoriginal for me, given the quality of the mainstream in 21st century. With only one trick from her hat - her voice. Don't care about it when the rest, melodies, production, etc... is bland and forgettable.

When you're mainstream from your early beginnings - it is just one step to become a corporate puppet.

Indeed. But her first two albums were healthy mainstream albums, quality stuff that could do good to the mass consumer. After 21, nobody was in a position to dictate terms to her - but instead of influencing the mainstream further, she succumbed to the mainstream. And that was not inevitable.